“The car started honking loudly,” said Li Hongyun, a 53-year-old Gansu Province pig farmer, who was visiting the capital with her husband and three daughters. “It then made several attempts to deftly maneuver around us before it finally screeched its wheels angrily and took out my husband.”

The car’s sole occupant, a young intern surnamed Tiao — who denies any responsibility for what ensued and has since been detained by police — was described by witnesses as “pounding frantically” on the car’s windows, before being unceremoniously ejected “several meters into the air, legs kicking” from the newly autonomous Kai Te.

According to witnesses, the car then killed 11 souls as police stood by, realized it had a “taste for blood,” and changed course for Nanluoguxiang, a dangerously un-pedestrianized hutong popular among Chinese hipsters and foreign tourists.

“My life flashed before my eyes,” said Liu Beibei, 22-year-old owner of Thongs & Things. “I jumped out of the way and watched as the car moved forward and backward over a group of six fair but helpless students from the Central Academy of Drama before turning its wheels up-road.”

“It was like a shooting gallery,” said Lao Zugong, 81, a Chinese civil war veteran and long-time resident of the narrow, over-rated retirement community-cum-shopping district, who managed to escape the carnage.

The car went on to plow down 17 more Chinese visitors until it came face to face with Michael Knecht, 58, from Berlin, Germany, where it met its timely demise.

Knecht issued a statement upon being released from hospital claiming to have a ‘preternatural connection’ with Kai Te

According to Knecht’s wife, Du Du, 23, her husband “leapt out in front of the car,” somewhere near the north entrance of Nanluoguxiang, “on its way toward Houhai, probably,” said Du.

‘“Are you drunk?’ I shouted to him. ‘Look at the plate of government. Get out of the hell way!’” said Du. “But the ghost car suddenly stopped when it saw Michael.”

Surveillance footage from a nearby ATM shows Knecht, clutching a white KFC sack, repeatedly standing in the way of the car’s attempts to move around him.

“What are you doing here?” witnesses described Knecht as reasoning with the car. “Go home. This is a good hutong.”

Kai Te then suffered “an apparent attack of conscience,” said an emotional Gui Zidong, lead engineer in the experimental military program, “and self-destructed.”

Knecht sustained a light concussion from the impact of fragments of the car’s tri-helical plasteel molecular bonded shell but is otherwise expected to make a full recovery.

“I’m no hero,” Knect told reporters upon being released from hospital. “I just did what any other foreigner would do.”

Gui has offered his own theory on Kai Te’s demise.

“The cognitive dissonance between the pleasure of killing Chinese citizens versus the fear of creating an international incident with a random white guy overloaded Kai Te’s Alpha Circuit, resulting in the autocide.”